​Last Thursday musician and UFO enthusiast Tom DeLonge appeared on The Joe Rogan Experience in order to promote To the Stars, Inc., his for-profit technology and entertainment company currently soliciting investment from the public to pay back the company’s massive financial obligations to DeLonge and to fund its explorations into science fiction and fringe science. Basically, it amounted to DeLonge telling Rogan that he knows all sorts of cool stuff but won’t tell anyone until he gets paid.

​To understand why Tom DeLonge’s story isn’t trustworthy, even if he is telling only true statements, I think it would be helpful for me to tell a true story that is 100% factually accurate while being totally misleading:

Some time ago, I traveled to Washington, D.C., where I met with a man who served in a top-level position in the Administration and who had the highest security clearance. On a rainy afternoon, we met in the Russell Senate Office Building, where a friend of mine worked as a top-level Senate staffer. After an exclusive private briefing about government matters, I asked him about the UFO phenomenon, and he provided me with U.S. government information about extraterrestrial spacecraft that I, like DeLonge, am of course unwilling to share with the general public.

But the power of words can create a mystery where there is none. Let me pull back the curtain:

In 1998, I went on a high school field trip to Washington. A classmate of mine, who would, as an adult, serve as a Senate staffer, had an uncle who was a longtime aid to Joe Biden and served in a high ranking position under Biden in the Obama Administration. He volunteered to give the class a tour of the Senate and share “inside” information about how government works. I did indeed ask him about UFOs because it was 1998 and The X-Files was huge. As for the “information”… Well, it was just that Congress didn’t have any since it wasn’t a subject they worked on. He jokingly said not to tell anyone.

I like the first version better, and clearly DeLonge is a fan of spinning mysteries out of half-truths, selective information, and implication.

The interview began with DeLonge telling Rogan that the U.S. government has time travel technology that uses time bubbles and the Doppler effect’s “red shift” to allow viewers to review frozen moments in time. He claims that he is working on an electromagnetic vehicle that will move through time. Rogan pressed DeLonge to explain more, and DeLonge said that he would not go into it for reasons he also declined to provide. He made frequent reference to minor U.S. government agents and officials, and implied—but never actually said—that the government had asked him to keep quiet for the good of society. Basically, it’s high-gloss bullshit. During the podcast he admitted that he has never been “read in” on classified information.

Indeed, listen to how Tom DeLonge describes his particular brand of “secret” knowledge of UFOs and fringe phenomena: “I also knew that I knew shit that most people don’t know because I’ve studied it for so long and I happened to put some pieces together that most people don’t put together.” DeLonge repeatedly declined to explain what connections he had made that others do not share, but he claims that his novel Sekret Machines prompted the government to kidnap him and interrogate him at a hotel for two days because of his supposed knowledge of international governments cooperating to track UFOs. DeLonge said that the U.S. government believed he had illegal access to classified information because his novel came too close to the truth. Even Rogan found this hard to swallow, particularly when DeLonge said that he has been told never again to speak about the material already published in his book which is currently for sale for cash money. What a crock. Basically he is saying: Buy my book because the government won’​t let me read it out loud! Pay me! Pay me! Pay me!

Rogan asked where this secret information really came from, and DeLonge confessed that it came from twentieth century UFO books. DeLonge said that he had spent a decade reading books about UFOs before he had this revelation, and here you can see the problem: He has simply absorbed crappy UFO books, the same ones that I and most of you have also read, and mistook the shared fictional world of ufology for a representation of reality. Just because these paperback fantasies tell variations on the same story doesn’t make them true. We have seen in these pages time and again that the books are packed with lies. Oh, and just for kicks, DeLonge attributes the secrecy to international bankers, or in his sloppy phrasing “world bankers,” which has been code for “evil Jews” for more than a century. He seems a little dim to know that, but then again, he also announced his belief (clearly born of uncritical reading of shitty paperback books) that the Nazis had sophisticated alien technology that they secreted away in Argentina and used to create the craft that crashed at Roswell. Specifically, the Argentinian Nazi UFO claim comes from Mattern Friedrich’s bonkers 1970s book UFOs: Nazi Secret Weapons. DeLonge, who praised the Nazis for being “100 years ahead of us,” has merely substituted Roswell for Friedrich’s claim that the Nazi UFOs arrived in Washington as the famous 1952 U.S. Capitol sighting. Roswell wasn’t famous in the 1970s because its myth had not yet been invented practically from whole cloth.

DeLonge also claims that there is a group of “dudes in suits” who manage culture in order to hide the truth about aliens from humanity, mostly by creating “memes” that distract the public from essential questions. You will recognize this claim. It’s from Jacques Vallée’s 1979 book Messengers of Deception.

The more DeLonge talks, the easier it becomes to see how his reading of 1970s-1990s paperback fringe books underlies the UFO fantasy he has woven together. We already know that DeLonge’s views on ancient astronauts draw heavily on Zecharia Sitchin, with a few minor tweaks. (See my Sekret Machines: God, Man and War review,Part 1,Part 2, andPart 3.) He also made the absurd claim that the Roswell wreckage had an inscription written in ancient Greek that said “freedom.” This claim has been banging about the internet since the 1990s, but it’s based on a fake image generated from drawings made decades after the fact. The supposed characters later transmuted in myth into “glyphs” originate in the tape used to hold together the spy balloon that actually crashed in Roswell. The tape was from a toy factory and had a pattern of kid-friendly shapes such as hearts, clouds, etc., according to Kendrick Frazier, writing in the current Skeptical Inquirer.

DeLonge claims that a U.S. government official met with him in public at an airport restaurant, and informed DeLonge—again, in public!—that the U.S. government found an alien lifeform during the Cold War. Naturally, DeLonge offered no proof and no details, and in fact he concedes that he never asked the official where the lifeform was found or what it is. You would think someone who claims to be obsessed with aliens would be interested in such niceties as what the goddamn aliens look like, or how they know them to be from another world. When Rogan asked him if he considered that the man might be a liar, DeLonge said it was not possible. (Ha!) Instead, he turned the conversation back to himself and explained that the Pentagon wanted DeLonge because “I have a service” that provides the Pentagon with entertainment and social media communication services to provide minor disclosures to “young people.” DeLonge claims that Pentagon officials cannot share the information themselves because … and I cannot believe I am writing this … he said they do not have a way to communicate through entertainment without him. “This shit is monumentally big,” he said. I couldn’t agree more. This is a massive pile of shit.

The Pentagon, you will recall, pays for military propaganda to be inserted into sporting events (they invented the decade-old “tradition” of NFL players lining up for the national anthem) and into entertainment programs and Hollywood movies, which give the government veto power over scripts. Given the government’s high-level connections with the biggest sports leagues and Hollywood studios, I cannot imagine why they would need a third-rate former rock star for their messaging, especially one that DeLonge himself admits feels no need to share “everything” but only select disclosures that he feels the public would be able to handle.

Does that mean that we must modify his claim to say that he is asking to be paid to decide for us what we can handle? Presumably this will include the fake facts that DeLonge endorsed, such as “nuclear” bombs on Mars (as seen on Ancient Aliens) and the imaginary pyramids of Mars. It will not, however, include questions about whether human beings are alien hybrids or whether aliens are masquerading as celebrities since DeLonge considers such questions “disturbing” and said that the public doesn’t “need to know that shit.” Would you trust DeLonge to decide what you can and cannot handle?

The only interesting thing I found in the podcast is DeLonge’s claim that a lump of metal supposedly from a UFO was “3D printed” from various metals of exceptional purity, formed in zero-gravity with physical properties not of this Earth. He alleges that when exposed to electron beams the metal loses mass and will float. DeLonge claims he will soon show the metal, but what is interesting to me is that the claim is quite similar to Jacques Vallée’s recent claim that he, too, was investigating lumps of metal from UFOs and also found unearthly physical properties. Is this a coincidence? It seems strange to find two ufologists making quite similar claims within weeks of one another. Unlike Vallée, however, DeLonge claims that his piece of metal, when used in airplane-like vehicles, will distort space-time to make transportation faster. That said, the claim that metals can be 3D-printed to allow “consciousness” to “move through” their molecules will require much more proof than a fading rock star’s say-so.

DeLonge said he met with an unnamed director of both the CIA and NSA, and that he had asked DeLonge to connect UFOs to Greek mythology, a pet subject of his. Even though Michael Hayden is the only person I am aware of who has served in both positions, DeLonge claims it is not him. Whoever the man is supposed to be, DeLonge said that he directed DeLonge to a specific, and again unnamed, Sumerian king as a key figure in the UFO enigma. (I assume he is misremembering either the Gilgamesh epic or the “mystery” of why the Sumerian King List closely resembles the list of antediluvian Jewish patriarchs, both popular subjects in fringe literature.) DeLonge added that Zecharia Sitchin is the only person to have come close to the truth when he determined that angels and gods were actually evil space aliens, excepting of course DeLonge himself, who knows the “real” truth.

Rogan and DeLonge repeat many silly Sitchin claims about Sumerians, which are actually referring to Babylonians, and they allege that the ancients had a map of the solar system, including the dwarf planet Pluto. The image in question is not a “map,” is not to scale, and does not depict the solar system. It shows some circles surrounding a six-pointed star. Unless your solar system contains a bunch of planets about to crash into each other, it is not a map of anything. Here is a lengthier analysis from Michael Heiser with extensive detail on the image in question.

DeLonge also said he believed that humans lived alongside dinosaurs and that there were antediluvian lost civilizations. He claimed that the U.S. government invaded Iraq to gain access to the records of these lost civilizations, which is an internet conspiracy that sprang up in the wake of the Iraq War in a failed attempt to justify George W. Bush’s war of choice in cosmic terms.

I went into the interview thinking DeLonge was merely an opportunist looking to cash in. But then his frequent reference to young adults twenty years his junior and his harking back to his own adolescent years two decades ago strongly suggested that alongside whatever financial motives he has, DeLonge is also a case of arrested development, trying to eternally relive his youth through a fantasy life based on the interests of his own young adult years. However, near the end of the podcast, money reared its head again. Even Rogan found himself baffled by DeLonge’s conspiratorial sales pitch that the public should buy the “small amount” of shares in his company (5 million out of around 100 million, according to SEC filings) so that the public will have a vested interest when the government tries to shut down the company for exposing too much truth, the same government that DeLonge claimed to be working with hand-in-glove. He can’t really get his story straight because the fringe conspiracies are coloring atop an entertainment company. It’s just another story.

“What we’re doing happens to be extremely lucrative,” DeLonge said, honestly, before backtracking and telling another story about how he will create a trillion-dollar super-spaceship, presumably the same one that will be traveling through time. Cool story, bro.

Joe Rogan asked if UFO disclosure is DeLonge’s end goal. “My end goal is to build a company that changes the world by doing a traditional IPO in the next five to seven years,” DeLonge said. Were there ever more inspiring words, or a greater rallying cry in tireless pursuit of truth? It’s almost endearing how DeLonge keeps blurting out the truth no matter how hard he tries to obfuscate and dissemble.

To paraphrase Jim Cornette, "I wish I could buy DeLonge for what he is worth and sell him for what he thinks he is worth."

I gotta hand it to him. He's trying to beat David Wilcock at his own game. I guess we'll see whose government sources, "hidden truth" and role as chief informant is better.

In the meanwhile, don't forget to pony up the necessary fee(s) for that promised "truth".

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Campblor

11/1/2017 07:24:51 pm

To use another Jim Cornette line "watching a DeLonge interview is like picking up a turd from the clean end"

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Clete

10/31/2017 02:35:29 pm

I guess the next thing for Tom DeLonge to do to raise money is to stand on a street corner with a sign "Will reveal the truth to you for "x" amount.

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Clint Knapp

10/31/2017 04:32:20 pm

I overheard a conversation once about how one man knew too much and in it he revealed the secret to the UFO phenomenon, how it relates to current events, and how one can become personally empowered by chasing the truth. I'm planning to write a book about it called "Douchebag for Hire".

Please fund this effort via Kickstarter. The first ten $1,000 donors will receive an autographed T-shirt with the logo on it and a swift kick in the genitals- to be delivered at signing events held exclusively at B. Dalton's Booksellers nationwide.

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Chew

11/9/2017 09:49:21 pm

HAHAHAHA, that funny shit.

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Tom DeLonge

10/31/2017 08:41:55 pm

Jason you are a loser. You take my words out of context. I have the truth, while no one wants to give you facts. You are such a loser, and facts don't matter to you. Idiot!

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Kip

11/1/2017 10:26:53 pm

Reading this with the Napoleon Dynamite voice was definitely more entertaining.

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Hans

11/2/2017 05:45:32 pm

How do i reply to this asshole??? He totally did not even listen to you at all and is trashing your name! What a fucking asshole this guy is.

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ZOMBELENIN

11/3/2017 11:18:17 am

I don't know if this is really you, Tom DeLonge, but I listened to the podcast. He has the right of it. You basically said your knowledge is almost entirely based on paperback books you read on the road with Blink, and you came across like you did not have any real knowledge about the topics you were speaking of beyond those books.

Whether or not this is true, I do not know; however, it is how you came across on Joe's podcast.

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Titus pullo

10/31/2017 09:03:30 pm

Love joe rogan podcasts but even joe haf a hard time not laughing him off. What a load of crap from his belief in a real life SHADO to zero point energy shit. His knowledge of basic physics is nill given he thinks there is no gravity in space. He pulled every idiot ufo theory and more. Put me in a great mood driving to work! And to top it off he is writing a bob lazard bio! Ha ha

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Americanegro

11/1/2017 10:39:25 am

Will he be spelling Bob Lazar's name correctly?

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Americanegro

10/31/2017 09:48:48 pm

The Pentagon did not make up the "tradition" of NFL players standing for the National Anthem. Because you used bad words in the article I will say please do not talk shit.

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ZOMBIELENIN

11/3/2017 11:14:34 am

Prior to 2009 player presence on the field for the national anthem was not required. Whether or not you assign causative power to the nearly 8 million dollars given to the NFL by the DOD to promote the honoring of the military on the field is up to you.

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Riley V

11/1/2017 01:00:20 am

Delonge is mixing one set of 1990s UFO myths with the 1990s myth of everyone getting rich with an IPO.

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Jim

11/1/2017 01:09:43 am

That is a great con if he can pull it off,, lol. Most of these pseudo-snakes try to sell you an overpriced book, tour, magic crystal or some other crap. He seems to not want to not bother with that, and just have the gullabillies give him the money for absolutely nothing.
Genius I tells ya !

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Matt

11/1/2017 08:43:15 am

"...he's deep into quantum this and that..."

...and that's enough for me.

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An Over-Educated Grunt

11/1/2017 10:34:51 am

Gotta say, I understand the frustration, but you slipped into ranting a good bit there. It's your blog, but if that turns into the norm, I'd step back and ask myself if I was hitting burnout.

Related, my local library has Sekret Machines. I was glad to see it labeled as fiction, less glad to see it labeled as first of a series when only one book has been published and with any luck DeLonge and company will flame out on the rest of the project.

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Julian Penrod

11/1/2017 12:05:16 pm

I have read many books on UFO's and strange phenomena from the early years of the Sixties. I've read about the Bermuda Triangle, Thomas Mantell, the Lubbock Lights, the Socorro Incident, Kenneth Arnold, “angel hair”, George Adamski, Betty and Barney Hill, claims of ancient aliens. Nowhere in any of these books did I see anything about Roswell, New Mexico. What many treat as a seminal incident in ufology, I never heard of until the Eighties. No early book that I have seen mentions it, but those who claim to be ufologists insist it was known about since 1947. I suspect, like Area 51, this is a false item that the government uses to try to control the gullible, send them where they want them to be, make them do what they want so they can keep an eye on them.
I should mention, too, that I never saw any reference to the “Yes, Virginia” letter before the Sixties, I have checked compendiums, collections of stories and items about Christmas going back years before the Sixties and saw no mention of it in any of them. This sounds very much like a fabricated incident, as well.

Julian Penrod

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Americanegro

11/1/2017 07:16:16 pm

The "Yes Virginia" letter was published in 1897 which shows your research is that of a mental defective. You bring less than nothing to the table. You remove.

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Julian Penrod

11/1/2017 11:39:04 pm

They say it was published in 1897. It's possible to produce realistic looking fakes that can fool some, if they ask for proof. “A Visit from St. Nicholas” was written in 1823, but reprinted in treasuries and compendiums for years. “The Gift of the Magi” was published in 1905 but was reprinted frequently even before the Sixties, “A Christmas Carol” was published in 1843, but presented over and over and over, even before the Sixties. The “Yes, Virginia” letter is not included in any collection of Christmas stories, poetry, songs, history before the Sixties. If anything existed and was that well known, it is not reasonable that it wouldn't occur in collections of stories and such before the Sixties.

Americanegro

11/2/2017 04:07:33 am

Wait wait you stupid retard.

Stuff was published, then reprinted.

Therefore it was not published before the 1960s.

That is your argument you incredibly retarded imbecile?

Betelgeuse

11/1/2017 09:06:28 pm

This article provided a very thorough take-down - links, accurate info and all. I too noticed similar claims to Vallee's recent statements regarding strange metalloids; I really hope that Vallee is not working with DeLonge, I was super disappointed that Vallee wrote the forward to that terrible regurgitation of Paleo-Contact Theory book, "Sekret Machines." Hopefully he is distancing himself from this now.

PS. Is that really DeLonge's response, calling the author of this article a "loser" not once but twice? Sorry I am internet-gullible, but if that is DeLonge's response to this article, that is priceless, especially after Jason accuses Tom of simply trying to revamp his youth with this UFO stuff ... Loser ....

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An Over-Educated Grunt

11/1/2017 09:14:04 pm

Yes, what IS his age again?

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Tom DeLonge

11/3/2017 01:57:26 pm

Look I just posted something that says I'm Tom DeLonge, but I'm not. C'mon, you question DeLonge's statements, but are accepting that the real Tom DeLonge got on here and decided to just call people names?

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Betelgeuse

11/3/2017 01:59:58 pm

Now I just posted something under your name. So I'll say you love Tom DeLonge and are a faithful follower of all he says. This blog is still a bit amateurish if people can do that.

An Over-Educated Grunt

11/3/2017 06:25:49 pm

Accept that someone used the internet to give a petty, childish response to a critical viewpoint, versus accept that the government is using the lead singer of a band from 20 years ago to inform us about the truth of alien contact? You're joking, right?

Not Tom Delonge or An Over-Educated Grunt

11/4/2017 02:26:47 pm

Why do critical thinking skills have to be either/or on this? You question his alien statements, but accept he would come to this blog and insult people in a ridiculous manner and run off...and ask "which is more likely"? Huh? That's not the point. Especially when I proved ANYONE can post under ANY name? As far as I know it's just me and another person posting under 20 different aliases here, or Jason Colavito posting under Tom DeLonge's name.

So what's more likely? The real Tom DeLonge came here and posted nonsense or that someone else used his name as a joke? This is a "skeptical" site right? You guys don't just accept things on face value...right?

An Over-Educated Grunt

11/4/2017 03:05:01 pm

Well, we've established that you're not over-educated at least.

On the one hand, you say it's unlikely the actual DeLonge would post. Perhaps, but the history of this blog shows that people respond to Google mention of their name. Don't believe me? Look up Scott Reaney, Nick Redfern, Steve St. Clair, or Scott Wolter in the search box. Every single one of them has shown up, posting as themselves. Some may later have been sock puppets, but the odds against all of them being sock puppets who also all post in a consistent style with the people they're mimicking are pretty small.

In the meantime, a washed-up musician claims the government wants him to slowly reveal aliens for money.

You see why one of these is plausibly and why the other isn't, or do you need another lecture on critical thinking and the analysis of evidence?

Sock Puppet

11/6/2017 11:12:14 pm

I think you are setting up an either/or that I'm not defending to justify something that apparently you want to believe . Both are implausible...I think you choose to believe in one more because you like the idea that the real Tom DeLonge came here and you got to make fun of him.

What happened is one of the other 8 billion people on this planet logged in under his name and posted garbage and left (or did they?) since as I said anyone can post under any name. My guess is that someone on this blog is impersonating him (well more like someones, since I did too) to either burn him in effigy or to see how many suckers fall for it. That's all silly fun to beat this pinata, but to really believe it is DeLonge is not critical thinking considering what was posted was ridiculous.

An Over-Educated Grunt

11/7/2017 12:02:53 pm

Except that, as I have said, it has happened before - not once, but four times I can name off the top of my head. I don't care if it's the actual Tom DeLonge or not, and I assume until proven otherwise that everyone online is lying. The question was why people would question his statements versus accepting that it might actually be him. It has happened before, repeatedly.

Y2Que

11/1/2017 10:15:17 pm

The government does not have veto power over scripts, they have the right to refuse access or to assist if they don't agree with the direction of a movie.

No fan of Delonge but I think if he was such a crackpot, then the ex-government employees would leave and this project would fall apart quickly. Maybe that will happen, maybe his 50% crazy talk is what the CIA wants to easily dismiss him if something comes out, maybe Delonge is pushed to the background and a better PR guy becomes the front man.